tell me about it

I WATCHED IT FIRST I WATCHED IT FIRST!

Xiaobin gave me a great great pressie today :) We had our favorite dishes at Fish & Co and then…we went to catch Harry Potter on total impulse - we didn’t think we’d actually get tickets on short notice BUT WE DID WE DID AT LIDO WOO! THANKS BIN THANKS THANKS SO MUCH :D :D :D

But…the movie wasn’t great.

:(

SPOILER ALERT. Don’t read past this if you don’t want me to spoil the movie for you. Oh what the hell. The movie’s already spoilt, and not by me, but by a completely inefficient director and his incompetent screenwriters.

Actually, David Yates broke my frickin’ heart. The movie felt poorly constructed and rushed, like they were trying to get through all the specific plot points in a certain amount of time (i.e. not enough). The movie was hardly about the Order of the Phoenix; it should have been retitled ‘Harry Potter and the High Inquisitor’ because the movie was all about Dolores Umbridge.

Kreacher gets a two-scene cameo. Luna Lovegood was hardly loony (not a word from her about her father or anything really loopy, really), the kiss between Cho and Harry was brilliant but the rest of their relationship barely a blip on the radar. Grawp was an absolute teddy bear of a giant and not at all terrifying. Harry never got really upset about how he was being left out of everything (Ron and Hermione’s appointments as prefects have been cut out of the film).

In fact, Yates never made my emotions run high (except in the beginning; a delicious thrill and shock ran through me at the sudden appearance of the Dementors. I must say the movie started out very promising but degenerated rapidly into so much fluff) and the climaxes aren’t even worth mentioning because nothing rocked my world in this movie.

The Thestrals are beautiful yet when they ride on them to London, not one peep out of the rest of the gang about how THEY CAN’T EVEN BLOODY SEE THEIR MOUNTS, CAN THEY; Bellatrix Lestrange wasn’t given enough screen time because Helena Bonham-Carter could have done so much better. Cho is two-dimensional. The revelation that James Potter was actually a sneaky little bully back in Hogwarts is received by Harry by a perplexing amount of disinterest.

The prophecy gets about two seconds of screen time without anyone knowing quite why it’s so bloody important in the first place. Sirius’ death - eh, boring, and Harry doesn’t really look very upset. The movie ends abruptly and without any sense of closure, which didn’t really matter to me anymore because I was just feeling so bleh about the whole thing.

I did like some of the little sidenotes, like Ginny’s discernable jealousy when she turns back to watch Harry approach Cho, Ron’s jealousy when Grawp gives Hermione presents, and the interesting side headlines on the Daily Prophet.

Those and the fact that Daniel Radcliffe is all grown-up and purty now are the only plus points in the whole film.

Sigh.

That’s the sound of my heart breaking. They’ve done no justice to Rowling or the series and I’m just going to have to wait for my ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ and my owl plushie to repair the damage done.